Nice work, IaNerd and EdvinW! I agree completely that 4th position is the best on a Newton fourkey. I play in fourth position at least 70% of the time. One of the nicest things about the 4th position is that both the standard (Ionian) major scale and the natural minor scale in 4th position have five...

Thanks Triona and Edvin for listening. It is tricky to play the same song on two different tunings. But "cramped and squeaky" may be a fair description of my bending even on a good day! As I remarked earlier, I found at SPAH that people expressed much more interest in pentabender tuning than in four...

As requested, I have posted a recording of Satin Doll played on two pentatonic-tuned harmonicas, first an Eb-fourkey, then a C-pentabender: https://home.uchicago.edu/~rmyerson/images/pentatonicharps.wmv On both harmonicas the draw notes form a G-major pentatonic scale, which is very nice for this tu...

I greatly appreciate the thoughtful comments by EdvinW (Nov 14) and Brendan (Nov 22) above, and I am sorry to be so late in responding to them. My only excuse is that the quality of the comments deserved a good thoughtful reply, which takes time! Both Brendan and EdvinW observe correctly that my pos...

I have a friend who loves music from India and the Middle East, and he wanted a harmonica to play a favorite song which is in the E harmonic minor scale. I realized that we can design a tuning with just four holes per octave in which the blow and draw notes exactly form an E harmonic minor scale and...

Out of interest: If you want all chromatic notes without bends, why not play a chromatic harmonica? The motivation for pentatonic tunings was to be able to play all chromatic notes with bends, but without overblowing. And the point of the discussion above is that we can have this in a little harmon...

Thanks for the comments, CrawfordEs, Jazmaan, and Triona! I played harmonicas with several different pentatonic tunings at SPAH, and I discussed them with some great harmonica players there. I particularly appreciated the opportunity to talk with Brendan Power. All these interactions were very helpf...

Last time, we saw that pentatonic tunings can allow you to play anywhere from one to four major keys without bending, where the number of such keys depends on how far apart the two pentatonic scales are in the circle of fifths. Let me now display layouts for the four types of pentatonic-tunings that...